Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism is a cultural movement first and a set of visual moves a long way second. The word was coined by the critic Mark Dery in a 1993 essay, but he was naming work that had been going on for decades: Sun Ra and his Arkestra playing a cosmology as much as a music, George Clinton landing the Mothership on stage, Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany writing futures where Black people are present and central rather than quietly absent, Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor after them. The literature and the music are the tradition. Its central question is what a future looks like when it is imagined by people whose past includes the Middle Passage, and the answer usually involves reclaiming technology rather than fearing it. That is why a designer borrowing the look without the argument tends to produce something that reads as decoration.

The visual language most people now recognise comes largely from film and album art, and its most influential recent statement is the 2018 film Black Panther, whose production design by Hannah Beachler and costume design by Ruth E. Carter both won Academy Awards. From that lineage the recurring moves are: deep indigo, black and midnight blue as the ground, with gold and copper as the light in it; cosmic imagery, orbits, and star fields; geometry taken from textile and beadwork traditions and used structurally, as columns, frames and dividers rather than as a background pattern; a bold display face, often set in wide caps; and speculative technology drawn as architecture rather than as chrome. The structural use of pattern is the move most worth stealing correctly, because it is the one that separates this register from a wallpaper.

Two neighbours it gets confused with. Retro-futurism looks backward at somebody else’s discarded future, the chrome rockets and ray guns of the 1950s, and its mood is affectionate nostalgia; Afrofuturism is looking forward, and its mood is a claim about who gets to be there. Cyberpunk-ui shares the speculative frame and inverts the politics: it is neon, corporate, and pessimistic, and the technology is a boot on someone’s neck. Solarpunk is the closest in spirit, another optimistic register that argues a future is worth building, but it argues it through ecology rather than through diaspora. Worth knowing too that Nnedi Okorafor proposed “Africanfuturism” for work rooted directly in Africa and its cultures rather than in the diaspora, and that Amazofuturism is a separate Brazilian movement rather than another name for this one.

The care this register needs is not stylistic, it is attributional. The geometry comes from identifiable traditions, kente and adinkra and Ndebele among many others, made by specific peoples who are still making it, so sampling a pattern off a mood board and calling it futuristic is the failure mode. Name your references, commission from the communities the work comes from where you can, and do not reduce a movement with sixty years of literature and music behind it to indigo and gold. If all you actually need is a dark palette with a warm metallic accent, that is a fine thing to want, and it does not need this word.